Sharon M. Guten Colloquium Series: Akira Miyake

Title: What We Can Do to Help Our Students Learn More Effectively: A “Small-Teaching” Approach to Reducing Distractions and Academic Procrastination

Abstract: The main unifying theme for my research has been (individual differences in) the self-regulation of attention, thoughts, and behaviors. For example, I have examined individual differences in executive functions and their roles in complex cognition and socially and clinically relevant behaviors (e.g., sentence comprehension, stereotyping, substance use, repetitive negative thinking such as worry and rumination). More recently, I have become interested in applying the insights gained from my previous work on self-regulatory processes to educational settings. In this talk, I will focus on two major challenges that students and instructors alike regularly face in educational settings—(a) internal or external distractions during lectures (e.g., mind-wandering, media multitasking) and (b) academic procrastination—and present a series of studies we have conducted in both laboratory and classroom settings. In particular, I will present a simple model of self-control and emotion regulation that I believe is applicable to both of these educational challenges and then try to illustrate how this simple unifying model can provide an important theoretical basis for devising and implementing small yet potentially powerful changes that instructors can make relatively easily in their daily teaching to help students learn more effectively and possibly even improve their psychological well-being (e.g., reducing stress and anxiety). I will also outline my current and future research directions for conducting multi-classroom intervention studies (see, for example, Miyake & Kane, 2022, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science).